Aviation SMS Require Regular Safety Communications

Routine work may dull your alertness.

Careless or inattentive attitudes may soon replace the caution that existed when your job was new and interesting.

Without some periodic reawakening to the ever-present hazards in the aviation environment, lethargy deepens, and chances of accidents occurring increase without us even being aware of the risk.

You may not always recognize the importance of recurring safety training. Yet, this training benefits us all in many ways.

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Recurring Safety Training Courses Seen as Boring or Waste of Time

You may occasionally think recurring training is not necessary and a waste of time because you have been doing the same task for years without an accident.

An important benefit of recurring safety training is the reminder that danger can exist and that no one is immune to accidents. Therefore, it is important for everyone to understand:

• the purpose of routinely participating in recurring SMS training;
• why it will be useful to you; and
• what can happen when not following safety rules and procedures?

While you may not always feel this way, your company’s management is committed to your safety. Your safety is key to their operational and financial success. In short, this is a symbiotic relationship where when you are safe, you are not under pressure from internal and external forces, such as the civil aviation authority.

Internal and External Safety Resources for Recurring SMS Training

While your company may have your best interests at heart and is committed to your safety, upper management may not always have sufficient resources to provide aviation SMS training courses on a regular basis. From what I've seen, management often will have funds for basic SMS training courses, but advanced SMS training courses are often beyond the bounds of most safety budgets.

Due to limited resources, aviation service providers look for other effective ways to fulfill regulatory requirements by providing recurring SMS training. You may have seen safety newsletters and safety surveys. These are safety promotion activities designed to increase awareness and also provide recurrent training.

Safety Surveys and Safety Newsletters Internal SMS Training Tools

You may be surprised that safety surveys can be seen as training. Think about it for a moment. You are asked questions and given multiple-choice questions causing you to think. Often the answer is obvious, but the answers can be structured in a way that actually instructs you as to proper procedures.

Other times, your company may provide excerpts of safety articles in their safety newsletters. It is not uncommon for SMS consultants to write articles for safety newsletters. Have you seen these articles in your newsletters?

Aviation safety articles and newsletters serve as effective SMS training resources that empower you to learn at your own pace and to find safety topics that personally resonate with you.

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Safety Article Libraries in SMS Implementations

Your company may have a list of safety articles or books lying around the employee break area. These safety articles are designed to generate awareness and potentially help you avoid the same mistakes made by others.

Recurring safety training often incorporates safety article libraries. Safety article libraries are categorized lists of aviation safety articles that are made freely available to employees. Perhaps your company has such a library on its intranet. These safety articles may be sitting in a Lessons Learned Library.

Aviation safety articles provide you with the ability to optimize your training time by allowing access to training articles from any location with Internet or intranet access, depending on your company. Some companies have safety article libraries that track your progress to ensure company policies are being met regarding aviation SMS training.

Safety Article Libraries Allow Employees Flexibility

Safety article libraries are commonly very adaptable and help you to effectively choose the right safety articles to read that meet regulatory requirements. Your safety managers may also hold other articles that relate to aviation security best practices or soft skills, such as "dealing with difficult passengers."

Regardless of whether your company has a safety article library, you can always find valuable information without waiting for your managers to spoon-feed it to you. Proactive and safety-conscious employees seek out information to ensure they are following the best safety practices.

Your Company Benefits From Your Safety Training

How does the company benefit from your safety training? Injuries in the workplace cost the aviation industry millions of dollars in medical costs.

Your company also has to suffer from lost wages and the resultant productivity losses whenever you become injured or your actions result in injuring a fellow worker. By implementing recurring safety training, many injuries can be prevented with the understanding of how these accidents occur.

Recurring safety training helps you to give safety its due importance and shift beyond common sense in the application of preventive techniques. Safety articles may be the only training materials they can use to satisfy regulatory requirements for recurring SMS training.

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Final Thoughts on Aviation Safety Training

The importance of educational safety training articles cannot be ignored. They help our entire industry improve the workplace with effective sharing of hazard identification strategies and risk assessment and mitigation techniques. Safety articles are cost-effective tools that effectively provide training and increase safety awareness.

As a regular consumer of the aviation industry, I want to personally thank you for taking your safety training seriously and continuing to read educational safety articles.

If your company does not have a safety article library, they can either build their own very cheaply or purchase an off-the-shelf service. The more complete aviation SMS software tools have features of an aviation safety article training library.

If you are interested in seeing an aviation SMS database in action, ask us for a live demo, or watch aviation SMS software demo videos.

Last updated November 2024.